Materialisation of concept for Surging Verticality

Video of Catherine having her movement initiated and supported by the tensioned cloth attached to her heels, after being guided by Maggie through a Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement of lifting her heels and arms.

surging-verticality-catherine-001

Research Question:

How do we stay in touch with who we are in essence, at the level of the body, when we are using/interacting with technology?

Context:

Along the continuum of travelling between worlds indifferent, imagined & emergent, we are in transit.

Set-up:

“Travellers” have entered the “Sensorium Gymnasium” (SG) via the “Living Room” space where they learn about our (proposed) “Awareness Through Movement/thinking through the body”/mp3 player/voice guided journey” through the SG.

Travellers, tuned in to their mp3 player, leave their personal belongings safely in the “Living Room” and are free to interact with all or any of the SG’s various installations.

The sound track through the mp3 player is a sequence of mini Feldenkrais “Awareness Through Movement” explorations that will draw attention to the felt experience of the body and to the question of “how we stay in touch with who we are in essence, at the level of the body, when we are using / interacting with technology?”. Long gaps between voice-cued mini explorations allow for ease of participating in all that the SG has to offer. The content and timing of the mp3 soundtrack can be refined during our workshop days together. Catherine and I are currently working together to develop the basis before then.

As we’re imaging the SG, we see the Video-Cued Recall (VCR) installation as the finale, an exit point. Prior to that, we imagine the “Transit Lounge”, which can be as simple as 6 chairs lined up in a row. The mp3 soundtrack provides the instruction for what to do in each chair (See below). The traveller begins in chair #1 & goes through the 6 transit processes, then moves into the VCR booth for #7 (The Telling Wave).

If there can/is to be a sensor data component that can reflect in visual and/or sound scape the variations of movement quality in the 6 lounges, fantastic! For example, can there be a generative screen in front of the 6 chairs that can be experienced by other travellers from the other side?

IN TRANSIT: (experience is the test of reality)

Transit Lounges:

1.       The responsive wave

      I am waving just to get someone’s attention: automatic, external aim, achieves end, attention seeking; time is compressed

2.       The conscious wave

I am waving; I am a body waving in time; change of context; there has been a pre-wave influence (an imagined experience of my body/myself waving); there is reflection through the body’s experience

3.       The attentive wave

I am noticing how I am waving; I am attention; my wave is embodied; time is elongated

4.       The passive wave

I am feeling my arm being moved through the waving pathway; unbound experience through the body (in relation to the body of another). 

5.       The integrated wave

I am feeling the sensation of my arm, my whole body, myself waving; I am waving for the experience of waving 

6.       The double feedback wave

I am joined with another person; we wave; shared experience (in response to one another, waving as one)

7.       The telling wave

Reflective wave; considered experience; video-cued recall

EMERGENT: (aesthetic experience is the judge)

A seemingly simple exercise in pairs. Sitting opposite each other within arm’s reach, pressing palm to palm. Maggie’s only instruction. We wait …

A listening … tremulous vibrations in Jonathan’s fingertips … tiny shifts back and forth.

Maggie talked about the language of constraints

…

THE BRAIN

We develop habitual paths for action/cognition in our brain. Yet alternative paths are possible, lying dormant. The habitual path is the path of least resistance. To develop new paths or ways of being, we may need to block the habitual paths. Closing off one of the senses, like being blindfolded, assists this process.

attention assists learning

newborn infants have a high and constant supply of nucleus basalis. It is thought to facilitate learning – I need to read up on this, as I didn’t catch all of Maggie’s explanation.

The function of nucleus basalis in the brain

Maggie asked us to draw our brain. Then draw the functions of our own brain that were strongly or weakly developed.

My idea of my brain as a distributed entity, with dark swamps of creative ferment

The first workshop saw us progress into drawing outlines of our bodies (and planting sketches of skeletons within): trying to focus on our felt experience of the body while drawing representations of ourselves.

self image in progress

The switching between the analytical mode of experiencing the world and the “felt” became really predominant during this exercise. so often i resorted to what i think or know about the proportions of my body… and so much harder to draw from a feeling of my body. this only skims the surface of what we are re-addressing at this workshop: for me, that shift into body space, where it has all been head-space in the months leading up to this Bundanon residency.  following on from the self drawn image of body, then the real moment of truth, another person (in my case george) tracking around my body with a different coloured texta. at this point, the confrontation is minimal, although i was hoping that i had exaggerated and proved wrong… but no, my hips really are that wide.

This immediacy of self image really brings both the notion and the reality into the fore of my consciousness. and using simple tools such as texta to drive creativity from my body (whether thats just from physical movement, or my position in space in relation to the object i am creating). repositioning myself alongside and “in” my body was a very necessary excercise to continue with the following workshops.

We come back to clay again after an Awareness Through Movement session, and blindfolded, enter into another process, making ‘MY body’. I bring my attention to the feeling of my body in that moment – what stands out? My pelvis is strongly present to me through my sensation, really alive, and so my hands trace into a small ball of clay an impression of what I am feeling. Whereas yesterday, pen on paper, the pelvis remained elusive, frustrating, now excitement rushes through me, into my hands finding the bone-rich forms in 3-D, echoing my sense of this in me, the power of the sacrum and lower spine. Working upward is not possible with clay, and I really want to express the lightness of my spine upward through my chest. I’m lost for a while, feeling the darkness, listening to the sound of George moving rhythmically, insistently, moulding his clay alongside me. I REALLY want to look! Resigned to constraint, I take another small clump of clay and find the form of my shoulders and thorax. Time runs out, eyes are uncovered, and I am surprised by how much I can see in this latter piece.

When we took our blind folds off we saw that almost all of us had sculpted ourselves lying on our sides.  We had also all got our proportions almost exactly right.

The power of the blindfold is very inetersting to me right now.  Our visual sense so dominates our experience of the world – and it feels to me today that it is also linked firmly to my own analytical stance.  I appraise things with my eyes, i judge them.  Unable to see, I felt my way through the clay – i explored its properties, I worked with it and did not try to impose my version of the world on it. What would be the equivalent of a blindfold when I write?  What would help me work with the words and feel my way through them rather than trying to wrangle them into a form that I expect to be pleased with?

In the first session Catherine asked us to sculpt a body out of clay. In the second session we sculpted our own body while blindfolded. The body was to assume a posture or gesture familiar to us. In between these two sessions, Catherine lead us on a Feldenkrais exercise working with tilting the pelvis, articulating the spine and rotating the entire arm from the shoulder. At the beginning of the exercise, she asked us to register where the act of sculpting still resonated in the body. For me, I felt a glow in my abdomen, lower arms and hands.

My first body sculpted out of clay

The first clay sculpture had an almost chicken-like lower half, swollen abdomen, drumstick thighs. The chest was like heavily whipped water, almost ravaged. I wanted to show the intensity of emotion experienced in this part of the body. The clay allowed a easy translation of the dynamic, emotive qualities of human experience.

My body in clay ... sitting cross-legged

I felt a freedom being blindfolded, not caring so much about getting the visual form “right”. The pleasure in the body moving and making, feeling and stroking the clay, came to the foreground. I sculpted standing up, feeling the force of the earth under my feet feeding through my body and hands into the clay. I took heed of Catherine’s reminders about taking care of my body in the act of making … where was I holding tension, where did it hurt … shifting to a new position.

I notice my sculptures were both incomplete forms, offering suggestions, ambiguity in interpretation.

For The Distinct Body workshop we used large sheets of paper, felt tip pens and charcoals as drawing tools to map our evolving sense of body image through an experimental Feldenkrais process. The process of drawing our selves at 1 to 1 scale revealed how each of us initially perceived our own anatomy. A distorted view of our sense of scale, proportion and skeletal structure were evident, but gradually refined as our attention to our corporeal selves intensified. Armed with a heightened sense of our physicality we hit the bush for the second workshop!

The Situated Body workshop came about in dialogue with Catherine. I was interested for our group to explore another method to articulate a felt sense of the body through space. Using the landscape of Bundanon as a point of departure, we were asked to explore the experience of our body in relationship to the environment. How does our awareness of scale, distance, proximity, time, temperature, texture, light and airflow change our perceptions of the exterior environment and self? What sort of external typography did we identify and what does it invite us to do? In what form might this be communicated?

Just as I had identified a possible location I was ambushed by a herd of Kangaroos, probably curious about what I was doing, and perhaps I had stumbled too far into their territory? Not wanting to take any risks I hastily retreated. I will be interested to see what will emerge from this workshop when we return later in the week… 

In the act of drawing my own body outline and skeleton, i found myself ocscillating between drawing from the felt sense (how my imagination traced the edge of the body, the weightiness of bones and flesh pressing into the floor) and drawing on known anatomical models and ways of depicting bones. My sketchy knowledge of anatomy, the exact shape of bones, was challenged in this exercise. But then, that wasn’t what the exercise was about.

modes of representation, how to draw a bone, limited/limiting resources/skill, falling back on known ways, not really attending to the felt sense of my body

body image – constructed, imagined, lived, distorted

For Merleau-Ponty, the body image is dynamically constructed according to the value of the task.

I had difficulty gauging and translating the actual length or dimensions of my neck (i live with a long neck) into a visual representation, drawn on paper. I drew my neck longer than it actually was, despite using my hand to measure its dimensions. When drawing my body and checking visually what a certain part of the body looked like, I got mixed up between what it looked like in a prone position and what it looked like in a standing position, as the fall and twist of the limbs is different in each. At some point, Catherine made the statement, “what are you trying to do”. I then realised that I was attempting to achieve an accurate visual rendering from the outside, rather than a rendering from the felt internal sense of the body. In response, I began to vary the quality of the linework to suggest the quality of the felt sense of the limbs and bones, in particular, the heaviness or lightness, the torsion.

the felt contour of the body, focus of sensation, wavering line of coincidence, staying with, dropping out

Drawing from felt sense ... or not

THE SITUATED BODY

Wandering in the pastures and bush at Bundanon. Taking note of the effect of the environment on my bodily sensations and in turn, whether the attendance to the felt experience influences or changes my perception of the external environment.

A tall, spindly tree holds my attention. Its surging verticality commands an uplift in my own posture, a rising and thinning, a thin energetic line upwards. The surrounding trees conspire in this uprightness.

A surging sense of verticality

Further along the track, the peeling orange bark like a contagious skin disease rivets me to the spot. I stay a while, watching, listening. The sound of a leaf falling on the dry ground startles me. I feel a grabbing in my chest, the space above my diaphragm spasming. Another leaf or branch drops. I tune in to the staccato cascade of sounds, twitching and turning towards each sound. On the alert, ready to gather and move … my own small drama in the bush.

I stay with this listening. My own foot steps sound clomping and insensitive, out of place in the delicate warble of the bush. The steep slope invites a small musical phrase of footwork. Dry leaves rustle and crunch under my dancing feet.

We converge at Riversdale, a place of retreat, generous offering, unbelievably beautiful.